Alvastra pile dwelling

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Greg Tanner

Recently, the project benefited from a temporary insurgence of extra manpower in the form of two talented archaeologists who served as photographers digitalizing artifacts. One of our colleagues Sara Kusmin, as well as Jessika Lindquist, an intern...

In April, I had the opportunity to be able to spend a week in Virginia, USA at the home of Dr. Errett Callahan, a master flint knapper, archaeologist and pioneer of experimental archaeology. Errett has long been one of the people I have looked up to...

Recently, the Alvastra team went on a visit to Lund, in Southern Sweden, to take part and present our project for a group of Stone Age archaeologists active in that region of the country. While we were there, Nathalie and I spent a day studying...

We in the Alvastra project are excited to be excavating, in-house, a 25cm square block of in situ peat, soil and artifacts, cut and preserved from the site in 1930. It was placed and sealed in a wooden box immediately after removal and shipped to...

Hafted scrapers are typically unifacial (flaked on one side),made from flakes or blades of flint, that were then fixed or ”hafted” to a handle and used to scrape excess fat and flesh from animal hides as a part of the tanning process. I came across...

The pile dwelling is a site that has left evidence of many interesting cultural activities. One such activity that has become very evident whilst cataloguing the flint material is the destruction and/or re-use of apparently fully functional tools,...

There are two dominant types of projectile points that have been found in and around the pile dwelling at Alvastra. These are commonly referred to as tanged arrowheads and traverse arrowheads. Tanged arrowhead with fire damage from Alvastra pile...

There are literally thousands of pieces of flint in the material collected in the 1976-1980 investigations. These range in size from whole cores or pieces of cores and raw material to the smallest micro flakes, and debitage less than 1mm across. So...